London is on Berlin time?

Posted Sep 30, 2021 16:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: London is on Berlin time? by nim-nim
Parent article: A fork for the time-zone database?

> > The problem with giving timezones names is that you basically have a bunch of bad options, and no obvious "right" option

> There is an obvious good option – use country for countries that do not span multiple zones, and country/local-zone-name for the others.

Exactly. Well, actually, call the time zone whatever the locals call it, prefixed by the 2-letter iso country designation (with exceptions for whatever the country code exceptions are) so we'd have UK-GMT, EU-CET, US-MST. (Along with UK-BST, RU-BST and US-BST ... :-)

Then each of the place links says which timezone is valid for what times.

Half the problem seems to be the maintainer's confusion as to the difference between a timezone, a place, and a political jurisdiction. You CANNOT store accurate data if you do not account for all three separately.

(And this seems to be why people are upset - that the data is being corrupted ...)

Cheers,
Wol